Friday, November 30, 2012

Firefox Crash-and-Burn Syndrome

My love-hate relationship with Firefox is slowly shifting toward mostly hate. One reason: About every 7 to 10 days, I get a sudden crash where Firefox disappears except for the above dialog. Sometimes the Details button doesn't work. Making me wonder if Mozilla will even get the Crash Report after all.

Clearly, in a situation like this, Firefox is crashing after an unchecked error. (Otherwise why does Mozilla need a complete Crash Report? Why not just get the error code? Answer: There is no error code. The program doesn't know why it quit.) My strong suspicion is that AJAX-intensive sites like Gmail and Twitter are running the program out of memory. Constant client-server AJAX chatter from endless polling is an invitation to memory leakage. (Plus see this post.)

Someday I'll switch to Chrome 100%, but the way I work now is, I use Firefox for business-related browsing and Chrome for personal surfing. I like keeping them separate. I'll continue to use Firefox until the sad day comes when we part company forever. At that point, maybe I'll send flowers and a short, poignant good-bye note. Never to be seen again.

9 comments:

Funny, I almost never get one of those. I split my time between the two browsers fairly evenly at home, but I can't use Chrome at work due to rights management issues.

I wouldn't be able to completely break my Firefox habit until someone comes up with a decent Google Bookmarks add on for Chrome. GMarks for firefox is one of the best add-ons ever - nothing I've ever found on Chrome comes close.

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